Email Marketing: Ideas and inspiration from 11 years of award-winning campaigns

The challenges of today scream at you. How can I increase sales? Get more people to subscribe to my opt-in list? Ensure my emails end up in the inbox? What is the next technology to keep up with?

Sometimes it’s helpful to take a look back to see the future more clearly. Getting a sense of where we have been as email marketers helps us to better understand where we’re going. To quote Isaac Newton, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”

To help you do that, and find inspiration and ideas for your current email campaigns, let’s take a look back through the archives of the MarketingSherpa Email Awards.

But don’t overlook human interaction as well. Fossil Rim Wildlife Center did more than ask people to click in its Wildlife Watch newsletter. For example, the 1,800-acre natural wildlife conservation center asked readers to name a new baby giraffe.

This email was triggered to customers who made a donation to Dell’s “Plant a Tree” program when they purchased their Dell computer in April 2008, in a joint effort with The Conservation Fund and Carbonfund.org. Dell matched 100% of customers’ contributions in April as part of an Earth Day promotion.

“People buy from people. People don’t buy from companies, from stores or from websites; people buy from people. Marketing is not about programs; it is about relationships.” — Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS Institute (parent research organization of MarketingSherpa)

The ATP World Tour leveraged this principle in its welcome message for new members. It didn’t hurt that the person the men’s professional tennis governing body chose was well recognized by the target audience. The email message featured tennis player Roger Federer’s name in the ‘from:’ field, a note signed by Federer and a picture of Federer.

Idea #6: You don’t need more customers, you need to better serve the customers you already have (from 2011)

Lots of companies focus a lot of time and money on new customer acquisition.

Susan G. Komen for the Cure segmented its current event participants by fundraising performance, behavior, attitude and team affiliation to better serve the “customers” they already had. For example, the team created a completely separate track of email communication catering just to team captains.

As a result, the 2010 Susan G. Komen Global Race for the Cure raised more money with fewer total participants than in 2009, an outcome that challenges the assumption that the total number of event participants is the most important predictor of fundraising success.

Idea #7: Use real-time marketing to turn a loss into a win (from 2012)

Email is a pretty instant medium. Nimble and savvy marketing organizations can use it to react to real-time events.

The California State Parks Foundation (CSPF) strongly supported a state proposition that would have added an $18 annual surcharge to motor vehicle registrations to provide funding for state parks and wildlife conservation. Unfortunately, the proposition failed.

But CSPF leveraged this news to urge their supporters to sponsor a virtual vehicle and donate in symbolic increments of $18.

This strategy can obviously be effective for nonprofits. But for-profit companies can have passionate audiences, too. Some ideas to get your creative juices flowing:

The day a bill to label foods with GMOs fails in Congress, send an email promotion highlighting how your organic food is clearly labeled as GMO free.

The day a competing social media network turns off its data feed (I’m looking at you, Twitter), send an email promoting how websites can use your social network’s sharing counter button to show social proof.

The day your competitor’s niche B2B software product is acquired by a major platform, send an email highlighting the fact that your product integrates with all platforms (and not just the platform that acquired your competitor).

In the beginning of the 2010s (have we named this decade yet?), it was common to see the following scene at a marketing conference:

Speaker who makes money off of mobile marketing in some way asks audience to raise their hands if they have a smartphone

Lots and lots of marketers raise their hands

Speakers uses this unscientific survey as a proof point that marketers need to invest beaucoup budget in mobile marketing

Except, here’s the rub. That sample is meaningless, unless your target customer is marketers. The real question is — what do your customers do?

Mary Abrahamson, Email Marketing Specialist, Ferguson Enterprises (Best in Show — B2B), understood this. Which is why, when building her award-winning campaign, she was careful not to include elements that the recipient would need a smartphone to access.

Customers still overwhelmingly want email. In fact, it was the most popular way for companies to communicate with them, according to a 2015 survey we conducted.

Still, as popular as email is, customers want to be served by a company in every way they choose to communicate — from newspapers to social media.

Which is why, for the 2016 awards, we expanded to consider all marketing, not just email.

The winner — Karen Thomas-Smith, Vice President of Provider Marketing and Reference Management, Optum — also didn’t focus on a channel; she used an in-depth market study to discover and then focus on her customers and what they needed. Her team then created this content, and distributed it through a variety of channels.

This campaign helped Optum secure $52 million in new contracts for its new product offering in under one year.

Daniel Burstein, Senior Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS, Daniel oversees all editorial content coming from the MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa brands while helping to shape the editorial direction for MECLABS – working with our team of reporters to dig for actionable information while serving as an advocate for the audience. Daniel is also a frequent speaker and moderator at live events and on webinars. Previously, he was the main writer powering MarketingExperiments publishing engine. Prior to joining the team, Daniel was Vice President of MindPulse Communications, specializing in IT clients such as IBM, VMware and BEA Systems. Daniel has more than 15 years of experience in copywriting, editing, internal communications, sales enablement, and field marketing communications.

Nothing bothers me more in a newsletter than Spray and Pray, its Sales 101. Throw everything against the wall and see what sticks for people to view. The HP newsletter mentioned above reminds me of this tactic. Thanks for sharing!

Jack

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